The company (ticker: BBRY) reported Friday morning that it had missed the Street's revenue forecast for its fiscal first-quarter report, and delivered a loss of 13 cents a share—closer to break-even than a year earlier, but disappointing given that Wall Street was expecting a seven-cent profit. The shares fell nearly 28% to close at $10.46.

There's no point in sticking around to see if things will improve with new models—a lower-priced model called the Q5, expected this summer, and a high-end unit rumored to be named "Aristo," before the end of the year.

If any of that turns out for the better, you can always tune back in later. The stock's rise—it is up 66% since hitting a 52-week low of $6.31 on Sept. 24 of 2012—has been driven purely by momentum that's decidedly over.

The heart of the disappointment in the quarter was total shipments of 2.7 million smartphones running the company's BlackBerry 10 operating system, which made its debut in January to much fanfare. Not only was that lower than estimates that ranged from three million to five million units, it looked eerily like the last days of another smartphone turnaround story from the not-so-distant past: Palm.

You may recall the one-time digital organizer and smartphone champ tried to revive itself in 2009 by introducing a new operating system and new smartphones, to much fanfare; its share price soared that year.

The important point is that in its final quarter reporting as a public company, in February 2010, Palm sold 960,000 smartphones. In light of that, BlackBerry's 2.7 million units are thoroughly disappointing. BlackBerry has 72 million subscribers, something Palm never had. It has distribution via 300 carriers around the world and years of experience in the smartphone market, advantages Palm couldn't rely on.

If Palm could sell nearly a million phones even as it was going down the tubes, without the vast lock-in afforded BlackBerry, then the message for BlackBerry itself is clear: The redesigned software and handsets are not leading to a turnaround in the handset business anytime soon.

Rather, these new machines, the Z10 and the Q10, albeit perfectly good devices, are not even offsetting the continued decline in the older BB7 handsets, which also came in below expectations. (By way of comparison, Apple sold a little over 37 million iPhone units last quarter versus BlackBerry's total of 6.8 million new and old devices.)

I CAN APPRECIATE THE CONSTERNATION of BlackBerry fans, who love their favorite company's products. The Z10 is a fine device, as I wrote in a review just after it was released in January.

But the quarterly numbers confirm grim anecdotal evidence previously gathered that I had hoped would prove atypical. In meeting after meeting with business types, when I've whipped out the Z10 to demonstrate some of its nicer features, curiousity ensues, but eyes still glaze over after a few minutes, even among BlackBerry users. For those I've talked with, it is simply too little, too late.

So now that fantasies of a quick turnaround in the hardware business are over, where does the stock go?

That's still a possibility, even if the effort is harder for BlackBerry with its devices failing to catch on with consumers. One sum-of-the-parts estimate, provided by Macquarie Equities Research's Kevin Smithen, puts the fair value of BlackBerry shares at $9. His estimate, however, affixes no value to the money-losing hardware business, which he thinks no one wants to buy, and a valuation of $6.12 a share to the software-and-services portion. BlackBerry is projected to have $4 a share in cash at year's end and he discounts its breakup value by 10% as a public company.

But Smithen is leaving out about $3 in patent value, which may even be conservative by some people's estimates. And so, for value investors, there may be some upside from here.

A lot will depend on how much money BlackBerry has to spend to promote new models, which is anyone's guess but is bound to be more than anticipated given that the hardware revival is turning out to be a very tough nut to crack, if not ultimately impossible.

But the latest data on the U.S. market, released just after BlackBerry's report by research firm comScore, showed the Apple-Google duopoly firmly in charge.

Apple was still in first place as a percentage of smartphones owned among U.S. users in the three months ended in May, comScore relates, and in fact, its share rose fractionally to a healthy 39.2% from the three-month period ended in February. Samsung came in at No. 2, with 23%, and saw growth of 1.7 percentage points in its share. Nos. 3, 4 and 5, Taiwan's
HTC
(2498.Taiwan), Google's own Motorola division, and the other South Korean giant, LG Electronics (066570.Korea), each held less than a 9% share and saw their positions decline.

But more striking were the results by software platform, rather than hardware, where Google's Android took the top spot, running 52.4% of all smartphones in use. Apple's iOS was in second place, up 0.3%, at 39.2%.

And way, way down the roster, BlackBerry held third place at 4.8% of the market, and the Microsoft Windows Phone OS that Nokia ships had 3%.

Thus, despite widespread hopes for a "third way," the market seems stuck on two. I can't imagine that situation will last forever, though with BlackBerry and Nokia and Microsoft failing to wow consumers, it's hard to see how it will change anytime soon.